Was the creation of a domestic Guantanamo-style "black site" made inevitable by the Pentagon's practice of unloading military surplus weapons on local police departments? Maybe -- but it's remarkable how many inevitable things can be avoided if the people in charge just refuse to misbehave.

The Swedish Armed Forces were put on high alert this weekend, as there was an apparent intrusion -- not for the first or the last time -- by a Russian submarine into Swedish territorial waters, in the Stockholm Archipelago.

On Friday, Russia's Federal Security Service (the FSB) kidnapped an Estonian intelligence officer at gunpoint, using a smoke bomb and jamming Estonian radio communications. Moscow later claimed it had captured a spy.

This dangerous 21st century will be safer if the West is strong together. A strong West means a strong and legitimate NATO built on strong and credible armed forces. Wales is the place and the time to act. It is also the place and the time for NATO to be radical. NATO needs to rediscover a shared level of ambition that has been notably lacking of late, something which Moscow has been all too happy to exploit.

New research finds that potential terrorists cannot be identified using a single socio-economic profile. Similarly, at the individual level, homegrown terrorists are not driven by just one or even a prevalent set of motivations.

One month after the NATO summit, what have we learned? A new generation of youth who did not grow up in the shadow of the Cold War are beginning to ask questions about NATO, and the demonstrations offered them potent answers.

While the cloistered glitz of the NATO summit and the publicized gore of the anti-NATO protests left an indelible mark on those who participated in these events, to most the NATO summit was unremarkable. But what have we learned?

Making our neighborhoods safe won't be easy. We need to provide the young with the best, not the worst, educational opportunities. We need the police to make protecting the citizens of those streets a greater priority.

Here in my city of Chicago, as NATO gathers amid displays of military force as well as protests, I pray for comfort for all those who have lost a loved one to the ravages of war. I pray that the peace of Christ, which passes all human understanding, will knit together this weary and war-torn world.

Despite the fact that NATO might be "the most successful military alliance the world has ever seen," our transatlantic bonds go far beyond combined military operations. They are interwoven into the very fabric of our society.

Monday morning's headlines did nothing to burnish the city's reputation, and the $128 million that summit boosters said would be injected into the city's economy turned out to be a figment of their imagination.